11 comments:

Monsanto & DuPont are a thousand times worse at harming the health and well-being of the citizens than any imaginary problem with the NRA.At the very least GMO food should be labeled until it is taken off the market for products for human consumption.I'm glad Maher brought up the fact that Obama promised to get the food labeled and then hired a VP from Monsanto to be in charge of it. How'd that work out?

Typical elitist American. Would rather people in poorer countries starve, than have access to easily farmable food sources, simply because you fail to understand the science behind improved organisms. Humans have selectively bred particular species of plants and animals for hundreds of thousands of years, which amounts to genetic modification through artificial selection. If you have a garden at your home (like many Americans), the plants in it have been bred for the specific purpose of human consumption. When a science is applied to it (which would produce better foods, which may be grown in otherwise inhospitable environments) ignorant peasants such as yourself become frightened and grab the pitchforks.

I was torn on this in California, because ultimately I am all about providing information to the consumers and letting them make their own choice. However, there is no reason GMOs can’t be handled through market economics just as “organic” has been. There is not a legal requirement that non-organic foods be labeled as “non-organic”. Instead there is a market for organic foods of which producers tap into by labeling their foods as such (and the market has taken off in the last couple decades). Government oversight comes in by setting the standards for who gets to say “organic” on their label. Same goes for “grass-fed”, “free range”, etc., all of which could surely use some tweaking. There is no ban on selling eggs that are not labeled “these chickens laid their eggs in confined spaces”. We have now reached the point where if a product doesn’t say “organic” the consumer can assume it is not.

And that is why I opposed it. Ultimately it amounts to a ban on products that don’t have a special label, and you know how I feel about bans. I didn’t even see an exemption for individuals mail ordering a product from another state. It is just another example of California wanting corporations to make special products just for them (which means some of them won’t) and the consumers lose out on choices. If this was done on a national scale (which is what they were talking about in this video), it wouldn’t be as bad, but still applies for international products. Same goes for guns. When a state mandates something like microstamping, a producer has to do the math on whether it is worth staying in that market. The smaller the market, the more likely it is for them to pull out.